The Postcode Lottery Green Challenge is one of the largest sustainable enterprise competitions in the world.

"It's amazing to be recognized as a green entrepreneur by such a competition in the field of sustainable innovation. The prize money enables us to scale up our business model and further improve the technology in the Shiriki Hubs," said Henri Nyakarundi, Founder of ARED.

Both the startups, ARED and EarthEnable, hail from Kigali in Rwanda. They are two of the five green pioneers still in the running for the prize.

ARED has developed the Shiriki Hub, a mobile kiosk with solar panels, a Wi-Fi router and mobile phone charging stations.

"Being among the last five out of 515 entries is already a great achievement and honour. With the prize money we plan to scale within Rwanda and likely in three other countries. The prize money gives us the opportunity to test different scaling models to find a viable scale strategy to improve the health and lives of millions of people who are still living on dirt floors," said Gayatri Datar, Co-founder at EarthEnable.

EarthEnable offers a sustainable and inexpensive solution for cement floors, which are very CO2-intensive.

The Postcode Lottery Green Challenge finale will take place on 14 September 2017 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The three other finalists are: Glowee from France, Lightyear from the Netherlands and Pond from Denmark.

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